If you want to know how to make your first affiliate sale online, you should know that it can be daunting if you don’t know what you’re doing. Affiliate marketing in general is tough, but it doesn’t have to be if you follow some simple steps.
Why Affiliate Marketing is the Best Side Hustle
Affiliate marketing is awesome for generating passive income from a blog or website because you’re promoting products that are already proven to sell.
You get proven products, a proven sales page, and a niche that has already been proven to be responsive. You don’t have to create any products or handle customer support(P.S. You can earn up to $4,000 as an Apple customer support), because the merchant takes care of all of that.
You get to live the good life as an affiliate. You get to sit back and chill.
But while this sounds good and dandy, you have to make your first affiliate sale online to see more followers behind it. And this is exactly what I want to help you to do in today’s blog post. Here are some tips you can use to make your first affiliate sale online immediately. It doesn’t have to take long.
1) Understand Your Target Market
Picking a product to sell is one thing, but understanding the people you’re selling to is totally another. You have to promote products that solve the problems of people, or that help them to achieve a particular goal.
You can’t just pick a product to sell and then throw your affiliate link all over the web. This is the most ineffective way to promote anything.
Before you pick a product to promote, think about why people would visit your website. Think about your niche. People are coming to you for a reason, so your goal should be to satisfy what they’re looking for first, then suggest a product that can further assist them in achieving their goal.
Having a clear understanding of why someone would visit your website should be the driving force behind the product you promote. This will help you to pick the best affiliate products to promote once you have the traffic coming to your website.
2) Get Traffic
This might be the hardest part about making your first affiliate sale. You see, you can set up a blog, have a product to promote, have nice graphics, have an email autoresponder setup, etc… but if no one comes to your website, what good is any of this?
Traffic needs to be your number 1 priority, because without it, how are you going to sell anything?
Fortunately, there are lots of ways to get traffic to your website. I want you to know that while there are tons of ways to get traffic to your site, you DON’T have to use them all.
Many people focus solely on Youtube, while others focus solely on SEO. And the same goes for other traffic methods. It should be your goal to find a traffic strategy and master it. Once you learn how to drive hoards of traffic to your website, making your first affiliate sale will be as easy as pie.
3) Write Different Kinds Of Articles For Your Website Or Blog
There are many different kinds of articles that you can write on your website or blog, and you need to know how to write them. For example, you can write:
- How-To Tutorials
- Gift Guides
- Product Reviews
- Listicles
- Round-Ups
- And more
Sometimes you want to be extremely helpful with your articles and blog posts, and then sometimes it’s time to create a review about something. Sometimes your website visitors will ask you to create a review about a particular product because they want to get your opinion on it before they buy it.
You typically see this a lot with products on Amazon. This is a perfect opportunity to insert affiliate links in product reviews like this as people who are thinking about ordering a product will click on your affiliate link.
4) Start An Email Newsletter
I love email newsletters. Email newsletters can do alot of things for you, such as:
- Increase your website traffic
- Increase your affiliate commissions
- Increase your podcast subscribers
- Increase your Youtube views
- Increase your engagement
- And more
Email newsletters increase a lot of things, and they’re probably the fastest way to make your first affiliate sale online. They work so well because you’re typically providing helpful tips through your emails, all while re-introducing your affiliate product to your subscribers over and over again.
Some people choose to email their list every day, while some choose to email their list once per week. You will want to do your own testing to see which frequency works best for you. But typically, every 1–3 days is a good frequency to email your subscribers. You can get started with a free email autoresponder at Aweber.com.
5) Utilize Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is the easiest and fastest way to get eyeballs on your affiliate offer. The only downside of paid advertising is that you have to pay for it. So if you’re going to use paid advertising, make sure your advertising cost is relatively low, while the commission rate you’re going to make on each sale is relatively high.
I like to use the following paid advertising sources to get traffic back to my blog:
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Banner Ad Advertising
- Youtube Ads
- And more
There are a lot of places online where you can advertise, but you have to make sure it makes sense (and cents) when running your ad. There’s no sense in running an ad that costs you $50 when you’re only going to make $25 for each sale that you get.
Instead, if it costs you $50 to run the ad, strive for making $200 and above so that you don’t have to make a lot of sales to make a lot of money.
Final Thoughts On How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale Online
Making your first affiliate sale is achievable relatively fast if you’re a newcomer to affiliate marketing, and it doesn’t have to involve any hard grunt work. Perhaps the fastest way on how to make your first affiliate sale online is with paid advertising. It’s how I made my first affiliate sale a long time ago, and it’s how I still make affiliate sales today.
Focus on getting traffic to your website, and once the traffic is there, get them to opt-in to your email newsletter. But don’t just use any poor traffic source. You’ll end up spending alot of money on clicks that don’t convert, and that’ll only drain your wallet.
